Mass Migration and the Failure of Civilizational Nerve

Here is Bruce Thornton on “civilizational nerve”:

The fatal incoherence of globalism.

The people spoke on election day, and they decided that they like divided government, handing the House to the Democrats and strengthening the Republican hold on the Senate. This means that many pressing issues needing attention will languish in political limbo for another two years, even as the nation’s dysfunctions worsen. One of the longest and more serious is our broken immigration system, at a time when mass movements of peoples into Europe and the U.S. threaten the identity and core principles of Western Civilization.

Seven thousand migrants from Central America are still making their way through Mexico on their way to the U.S. These “caravans” appear to be organized and funded by the international left. In recent years such vast movements of people have become more common in Europe, which has been enduring such exoduses from the Middle East and North Africa for years. They accelerated in 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an open invitation to migrants. More recently they have been coming not on foot, but mainly on boats sailing across the Mediterranean. So far this year, nearly 100,000 have reached Spain, Italy, and Greece from North Africa and the Middle East. Both here and in Europe, these migrations have created logistical nightmares and increased security threats, and more importantly have empowered nationalist and patriotic political movements with a potent weapon to use against globalist establishments.

This is an existential crisis the West should have seen coming, because it was predicted by French travel-writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints. The book’s danger to the transnational progressive assault on national identity is suggested by its inclusion on the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s index librorum prohibitorum, and the knee-jerk dismissal of the novel as “racist” by bad readers. For Raspail doesn’t just tell a compelling story. He also lays out the West’s fashionable self-loathing and failure of civilizational nerve that create this disaster.

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